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January 25, 2008 > News > Report shows half black males at Rice are scholarship athletes

Report shows half black males at Rice are scholarship athletes

By Stephanie Jennings | Thresher staff

Rice may have been named 2006’s university with “Lots of Race/Class Interaction” by The Princeton Review, but the numbers behind this claim may not be telling the whole truth, according to a new article by InsideHigherEd.com.

The Jan. 11 story, “Diversifying through Football,” states that, according to data taken from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual survey for graduation rates, scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduate population at 96 of the 330 schools that play Division I sports.

At Rice, 47 of 99 black male full-time undergraduates are scholarship athletes. In particular, 35 out of these 47 are football players. While black students comprise 99 of the total 1,539 male undergraduate population, they account for 47 of the 161 scholarship athlete population.

According to the study, for which data was taken from the 2005-‘06 school year, this trend is evident in two types of schools: smaller, selective private institutions that compete athletically with larger state schools and public schools in states with small black populations. These schools mostly recruit locally or regionally, as with Montana State University, where 88 percent of its full-time black undergraduates are scholarship athletes, or Boise State University, with 37 percent scholarship athletes.

The NCAA study did not include data from either Ivy League universities or military academics, since the study only examined scholarship athletes and neither group of schools award athletic scholarships.

The study highlights the ongoing issue of increasing diversity at colleges nationwide and the possibility of schools increasing their black enrollment through athletics.

“I know there was talk in the past of getting rid of Division I Athletics at Rice,” Moreko Griggs, a Sid Richardson College senior, said. “I wonder if that had happened, what the black male enrollment at Rice would be?”

“That’s not an unusual statistic, especially if we’re talking about top-tier universities,” Catherine Clack, Office of Multicultural Affairs Director, said.

Clack, who is also the Assistant Dean of Undergraduates, said that the statistic is affected by a large number of social and economic factors, including an overall smaller percentage of black males than black females who attend college. According to the NCAA, black students make up 9.4 percent of undergraduates at Division I schools, compared to 12 percent for black females. At Rice, they make up six percent of the male undergraduate population.

“In the past, African-American students have pointed out this enrollment pattern to enrollment management, not because they have a problem with black male athletes, but because they want to be sure the admission office isn’t using athletics to bolster black enrollment,” Clack said. “I don’t feel like Enrollment Management is slacking on their job — they’re doing a great job.”

Black Student Association president Alicia Burns-Wright said she believes the black student athlete rate has some impact on students interested in applying to Rice, however.

“If you think about the spread of the black non-athlete males, there are only a few at each college,” Burns-Wright, a Jones College senior, said. “It’s really hard for them to find each other across campus. That’s not to say that athletes, non-athletes and people of different races can’t hang out together, but a black non-athlete is definitely having a different experience than everyone else.”

Clack disagrees.

“I think prospective black students overall look at the overall number of black students and who they could interact with terms of black students and not how many are athletes and how many aren’t,” she said.

Burns-Wright said she did not think there was any tension between black athletes and non-athletes, but that most of the separation between the two groups she observed was because of differing schedules.

“Just as one may more easily make friends within their college, it’s easier for athletes to befriend one another and non-athletes to befriend one another, unless the connection is somewhere else,” she said. “Because 99 black students in a population of 2,800 isn’t a large number, what are the chances that athlete and non-athlete black males will bump into each other in a different setting?”

Burns-Wright said that she thought the divisiveness between the two groups started with the relative lack of athlete involvement during Orientation Week.

“During O-Week, when everyone’s supposed to see all of the new students in the college, a lot of black male athletes are missing when they would see the rest of the black males participating within the college,” she said. “But it’s a problem that’s hard to fix overall — it’s not like the athletes can’t just not practice so both sides can be buddies.”

Burns-Wright said Rice could potentially lose black applicants in the future due to Rice’s lack of a cohesive black student athlete and non-athlete community,

Burns-Wright said that with schools such as Harvard offering tuition breaks for certain income groups, prospective black students may attend higher-ranked schools with larger non-athlete black male populations than Rice.

Clack, however, said she did not encounter this issue while working with admissions. She said the only people asking for a further demographic breakdown of athletes versus non-athletes were academicians or researchers.

Jones sophomore Max Paul said he has noticed a clear division between black athletes and black non-athletes.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m trying harder to be their friend,” he said. “But I think it’s a mindset of both sides, not having enough time to go beyond busy and differing schedules and be friends.”

Paul said that, for the most part as an electrical engineering major, he has not had professors mistake him for an athlete, but that could be due to the small number of athletes majoring in engineering overall.

“I’ve had one professor in a Spanish class ask me how a football game went,” Paul said. “But in engineering classes, I don’t think professors think I’m an athlete because it’s so uncommon for athletes to major in engineering.”

He said that the overall diversity of the campus and percentage of minorities was a greater factor in his college selection than the percentage of black students who were athletes.

“I knew that since Rice had Division I Athletics, there’d be a significant number of athletes,” he said.

The study highlights the ongoing issue of male minority college recruitment. According to Burns-Wright, 17 non-athlete black male freshmen enrolled at Rice this school year.

“The numbers in the study are from 2005-‘06, and we drastically improved our situation in this academic year,” Burns-Wright said. “The admissions office and the administration should really be commended for all of the effort they put behind that increase in non-athlete black males and the Black Student Association hopes they stay committed to maintaining and further increasing these numbers.”

End of article

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